I’m probably late to this outrage party but I finally got a chance to put some thoughts together on the “Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006″ HR 5319 IH bill. I wrote up a FAQ about it, and I thought I should also post it here, being the nature of this blog.

I am very disappointed by the passing of that bill. It shows an utter lack of understanding by our lawmakers on the implications of the technology they’re trying to regulate. I don’t think that children should necessarily be participating in MySpace from school, but what makes a site that’s purely about socialization different from a site that has good and potentially educational information needs to be more clearly defined if there’s going to be a Federal law restricting it. Under the loose definitions in the bill, any site that has user profiles is a socialization site.

Nearely EVERY site that has any kind of account system, where you must provide credentials and log in to access content has a profile associated with your account. This includes nearly all the useful sites for children to gather information or teachers to provide as resources such as news sites, forums, sites specifically FOR teaching children like Brain Pop, and even Wikipedia!! Most useful and relevant information on the web is now authored daily or hourly by user participation. What qualifies as a “chat site” anyway? What sites are left but those that don’t change frequently and have static content? Static information is old and obsolete.

I’ve already experienced a situation similar to this that was preventing me from doing my job. I am assigned at project at a government agency currently and needed to use Google Groups to research answers for development problems I was having. Google Groups search is one of the most useful tools available to find information like that (much better than the general Google search in many cases) since there is a plethora of technical forums on the internet. The agency had websensed Google Groups because you could potentially have a social group there. I had to beg and provide much justification before they’d make an exception for me (fortunately they did). Just because a site can be used for social purposes does not mean that there isn’t good and useful information to be found!

The problem is that many of the senators who passed this bill (most likely) know that its preposterous. It will be difficult or impossible to enforce in a reasonable manner because the definitions of “chat site” and “sites with profiles” are too broad-reaching: it will require exceptions to be made on a case-by-case basis. They know this, but they voted on it anyway. Why? Because come re-election time they don’t want their opponent to put an add on TV saying “Senator X voted against a bill that would protect YOUR CHILDREN from SEXUAL PREDATORS!!!”. That’s the only reason. The whole system is set up so that they can’t vote any other way if they want to stay in office. Personally I find this a glaring flaw in our political system. The rest of them voted out of ignorance about modern technology, but what can you expect about a group of sheltered people in their mid 50s or later? They live in such a different reality tunnel from the rest of the world. We desperately need a group of people who understand technology that can counsel Congress on it’s implications. People who understand that the internet is not, in fact, a series of tubes!

Here’s the deal, folks: we can’t protect our children from everything. If they grow up thinking that the world is a nice, friendly, puffy, happy place they will be ill-prepared for real life. They need to be taught early how to look out for danger, and guided (not shielded) away from it. Its a parent’s job to do that at home, and a teacher’s job to do that at school. But we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need to make sure that our children have access to the wealth of information on the internet for their education, as much or more than we need to set up “protections” that only complicate life for schools and make their job much harder.